I pulled this, but there's a reason we used to do it that way - gcchas had bugs with inline asm changing %ebx due to some bad interactionwith using it as the GOT base register for position-independent codeor something.

So I hope those are all solved, and I guess we use -fPIC only for someearly boot code. But in case this is ever used in some environmentthat is PIC (the vsyscall page?) we need to worry about gccinteractions.